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World-Systems Analysis and Globalization. a Jacobsean Exploration of Pasts, Presents and Futures the Immanuel Wallerstein Chair Annual Lecture Delivered by Peter J

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World-Systems Analysis and Globalization. a Jacobsean Exploration of Pasts, Presents and Futures the Immanuel Wallerstein Chair Annual Lecture Delivered by Peter J Belgeo Revue belge de géographie 3 | 2005 Miscellaneous World-systems analysis and globalization. A Jacobsean exploration of pasts, presents and futures The Immanuel Wallerstein Chair Annual Lecture delivered by Peter J. Taylor at the University of Ghent on October 21st, 2004 Peter J. Taylor Electronic version URL: https://journals.openedition.org/belgeo/12292 DOI: 10.4000/belgeo.12292 ISSN: 2294-9135 Publisher: National Committee of Geography of Belgium, Société Royale Belge de Géographie Printed version Date of publication: 30 September 2005 Number of pages: 265-274 ISSN: 1377-2368 Electronic reference Peter J. Taylor, “World-systems analysis and globalization. A Jacobsean exploration of pasts, presents and futures”, Belgeo [Online], 3 | 2005, Online since 28 October 2013, connection on 21 September 2021. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/belgeo/12292 ; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/belgeo.12292 This text was automatically generated on 21 September 2021. Belgeo est mis à disposition selon les termes de la licence Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. World-systems analysis and globalization. A Jacobsean exploration of pasts, p... 1 World-systems analysis and globalization. A Jacobsean exploration of pasts, presents and futures The Immanuel Wallerstein Chair Annual Lecture delivered by Peter J. Taylor at the University of Ghent on October 21st, 2004 Peter J. Taylor 1 I will use a recent news story to introduce this lecture. Last week the media reported a story with headlines such as: “Detroit to cut 10,000 jobs in Europe”. What does this mean? Apart from the peculiar geography – it’s not a city but a firm (General Motors) that has made the decision, and it’s not a “continent” that is affected but car plants mainly in cities in one country (Germany) – there are two important features: first, the process is transnational, and second, it is economic. In other words, it is an archetypal event that has come to be called “globalization”, featuring a major corporation in one country directly affecting the economy of another country. 2 This lecture is about globalization and its study, as interpreted by a world-systems analyst (i.e. me). The ideas associated with globalization and world-systems analysis are sometimes viewed as comparable and other times they are contrasted. Clearly I need to engage in some careful definitional work before providing a new interpretation of how world-systems analysis can inform our understanding of contemporary globalization. Thus I begin with definition exercises for first, world-systems analysis, and second, contemporary globalization. The new understanding is then presented as an adaption of Jane Jacobs’ classic work on the city to Saskia Sassen’s more recent classic work on the global city. Belgeo, 3 | 2005 World-systems analysis and globalization. A Jacobsean exploration of pasts, p... 2 World-systems analysis 3 World-systems analysis is an approach to understanding social change based upon geohistorical systems. These provide a space-time framework for understanding social change that replaces the orthodox use of nation-state as the basic unit of change (i.e. space as “homeland territory” and time as “rise of the nation”). Geohistorical systems denote specific structures of social relations that are concretely realized through time (trends and cycles) and space (extent and order). The modern world-system is a capitalist world-economy which is the geohistorical system in which we live. The basic geohistory is that it was constructed in Europe in the “long” 16th century, it expanded to cover the whole world by c.1900 (i.e destroying all other systems), and will meet its demise in the 21st century. 4 Looking at social change in this way we find that the basic motor of the system is ceaseless capitalist accumulation. This dominant process of social change generates specific times and spaces. 1. Structured times: (i) cycles (Kondratieff economic cycles of approximately 50 years length starting with an A-phase of growth followed by a B-phase of stagnation, and longer hegemonic cycles through which one “special” state dominates e.g. the twentieth century as “American century”) encompassed in (ii) asymptotic trends (such as labour costs, democratic demands, environmental crisis that are inevitably diminishing the overall rate of profit). 2. Structured spaces: (i) division of labour into core and periphery created by core-producing (high tech, high wage) and periphery-producing (low tech, low wage) processes supplemented by semi-periphery zones where the two processes are relatively balanced, and governance provided by (ii) multiple states as territorial sovereign units. 5 Although separated for pedagogic reasons, these two structures are intimately entwined to produce the social space-time structure that is the modern geohistorical system. 6 This approach to social science was pioneered by Immanuel Wallerstein in the 1970s. The first question you should always ask of new knowledge initiatives is about their own space-time context. What were the key geohistorical challenges that world-systems analysis was designed to overcome? Drawing on his “first world” experience of the 1968 revolutions that spurned the orthodox “old” left, and his “third world” experience of severe constraints on national liberation revolutions, Wallerstein directly challenged the two great geographical myths of the times: 7 Developmentalism – the world is divided into “developed” and “developing” countries; 8 Cold War thinking – the world is divided into “capitalist” and “communist” countries. 9 For Wallerstein, both development and “economic systems” are properties of the whole historical systems, NOT individual counties. World-systems analysis was devised to counter these myths. 10 How does this approach interpret the world today? The early twenty first century is a very unusual, exciting and unstable time for the two very different reasons: 1. There is a coincidence of the conclusions of Kondratieff (economic restructuring) and hegemonic cycles (political reordering) producing major ordinary stresses in the system 2. There is the more important coincidence of the asymptotic trends (e.g. effects of treating environment as “external”) approaching their limits to generate extraordinary crisis in the system. All geohistorical systems come to an end (i.e. they are historical); we are now in the Belgeo, 3 | 2005 World-systems analysis and globalization. A Jacobsean exploration of pasts, p... 3 demise phase of our modern world-system. Wallerstein calls this an Age of Transition to a new unknown (unknowable) world-system. This challenges the Enlightenment belief in social progress as an inevitable feature of social change, an idea translated by socialists into the “forward march of labour”. Globalization 11 Globalization comprises a bundle of processes that originated in the 1970s with: 1. the rise of multinational corporations culminating in “global reach” (a popular book of that name appeared in 1973) producing a new international division of labour; and 2. the collapse of Bretton Woods fixed currency arrangements in 1971 culminating in a new worldwide financial market (transcending national control); both based upon 3 . computing/communication enabling technology that made such worldwide organization possible. 12 The concept of globalization has been applied to all spheres of social activity – global civil society, global governance, global culture, and global economy – but it has been the latter that has dominated the discourse. This is because globalization has been closely associated with the rise of neo-liberalism, the dismantling of state mechanisms of economic protection and redistribution built up throughout the twentieth century. With its privileging of market processes, proponents of globalization favour, indeed famously proclaim, a borderless world. 13 The discourse of globalization is largely a product of the 1990s. There were three key political challenges that globalization proponents were trying to overcome. This politics was about making all the world attractive to capital: 1. In the “second world” through the incorporation of the USSR and its sphere of influence with the end of the Cold War; 2. In the “third world” through structural adjustment programmes to reduce social expenditure in the new “unipolar world” (the “Washington consensus”); 3. In the “first world” through cutting back on the welfare state provisions (Reaganomics, Thatcherism, TINA – “there is no alternative). 14 Generally, this involved the privatization of state assets, and “opening” state economies to foreign investment and trade. The end-result was to move from “three worlds” to “one world” = GLOBALIZATION. 15 Globalization is truly a keyword of our times, overwhelming all other conceptions of macro-social change in the 1990s. Today it is a hugely contested concept both empirically and politically. My position is as follows: 1. Empirically, I accept the evidence for contemporary social change being truly distinctive, in part, because of the intensity of its global operations; 2. Politically, I reject the globalization mantra that “there is no alternative”; globalization does not have to be regressive. 16 These positions are basic world-systems interpretations. Belgeo, 3 | 2005 World-systems analysis and globalization. A Jacobsean exploration of pasts, p... 4 Relationship between world-systems analysis & globalization 17 How do the two discourses on social change relate to one another? Put simply: globalization proponents treat world-systems
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